Woody Allen's Manhattan movies, particularly "Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986) inhabit the same liberal, Jewish, Upper West Side life as Marco Roth's affecting memoir "The Scientists," which evokes that world of intellectuals, Oriental rugs and a postwar highbrow aesthetic of Schubert, Turgenev and Mann.

This is less of a confessional memoir than a fiercely intellectual one, but that's not to say it's not emotionally powerful. Roth's physician father died of AIDS, and he said he had been infected by a random needle puncture. In a sort of counter-memoir, the prominent writer and early feminist Anne Roiphe suggested that her brother — Marco's father — contracted the infection in a more common way than a slip of a needle. This set Marco Roth on his own mission to figure out his father's secret.

This unsentimental memoir is a cautionary tale about hyper-intellectualism in which emotional life is at the back of the bus.